Anno 2205 Shows Modular Buildings And Moon Colonies

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I haven’t played an Anno game since it was a series about building quaint trading colonies in the 18th century, and so I’m quietly impressed by these videos of Anno 2205 [official site]. Not because it’s set in the future in which you build moon colonies and ferry goods with spaceships, but because its landscapes look so big and pretty. Step below and learn about some modular buildings, sure, but also just look at the vast metropolises.

The latest trailer is part of a series detailing the game’s new features, and this one focuses on the brand new ability to expand existing buildings in order to increase their capacity. This might take the form of adding new wind turbines to an existing power plant instead of simply building an entirely new one. It’s a feature that’s been in other city building games for a long time, but now you get to do it with futuristic wind turbines.

The previous video in the series is perhaps more interesting, given that it deals with your ability to expand your trading colony beyond the borders of planet earth and onto the lunar surface. You’ll have to deal with different environmental issues depending on whether you’re building among conifers or the dusty dunes of the Moon, and our Duncan had a fun time with the amount of micromanagement required to run multiple colonies when he gave the game a go earlier this year. He wrote:

“If you’re the type of gamer that loves micromanagement (and I very much am) then you’ll find this sort of fiddling pretty satisfying. During my half-hour with the game, I had a fun time trading the needs of my residents off against the need for more residents. Thanks to a much larger city available to trade with nearby, many of the obstacles to rapid growth were easily hurdled and I hit what appeared to be the ‘endgame’ of the sandbox within that half-hour.”

Anno 2205 is due for release next week, on November 3rd. We should have a review up there or thereabouts.

20 Comments

Being an Anno fan since the beginning I’m very excited for the new one. Not only have I preordered it, today I even bought an actual magazine (with paper and ink and all that) because it featured Anno 2205. And while the review generally speaking hyped me further one detail stuck out to me that I hadn’t really heard about before: There are only 9 maps/sessions, 3 for each of the 3 biomes.

These are larger than anything before but still that is whole lot less than in previous Annos. Even considering all the ways the “random” maps were similar to each other. I fear that this will make the game borderline solvable (at least if you want to go for maximum population) since in a long game you’ll always be settling all 9 of them.

Same. It looks glorious. I’d buy it in a hot minute….were it not an UbiShaft game. Very nearly bought 2070 on Steam this week when it was 7 quid but the very many negative reviews about the DRM stopped me.

I’ll believe it when they make a show of good faith, and release DRM free versions of the previous Anno titles. Until then (or the new one is out and really DRM free) its just platitudes, and I will assume the new game is going to have DRM that is just as bad, while the PR people try to claim its better some how.

For me its just not the DRM i adored anno but it only did different era and a boost in graphic it became that game that never fix anything and just improve graphically or adds new problem instead..the online stuff in the last one was horrible and the ark thing was even worst…they also keep pushing you to fight in these game yet its still the horrible fighting system that looks and feel really bad for todays standard…the AI also tend to cheat all the time and you end up fighting something that doesn’t feel like its another civilisation but instead just a dumb comp with stupid advantage so you might destroy is entire economy or just cripple it and it will not change a thing he will still pump out unit or rebuild with infinite resource.

The multiplayer in these game is also quite awful i never enjoyed it at all..you end up basically just rushing island to get advantage and if you corner some resource you basically win because its just not a game big enough to make that kind of gameplay fun.

The thing with module(which im guessing come straight from simcity) while it did sounds fun on paper in simcity…you end up with the problem of island size and map size…it was already a problem in anno with high end stuff but having to keep enough free space for these module that you may or may not use seems silly…hell even simcity ended up doing it on the building themself in their expansion which showed that it was indeed a problem.

All in all i want fix for persisting problem more then a new era and graphic in these games now..and Uplay of course need to go..after so many fail you would think that people would learn that its shit but…w/e

I may be alone in this sentiment, but I found Anno 2070 to be too full of extra “fluff” materials, goods and the added complexity of the very much required module creation. Anno 2070 starts to feel more like a chore to play when you get to the higher levels of production requirements to advance or supplying and maintaining your very large (20k+) population.

I still like Anno 2070, complexity is part of the fun and challenge, but I feel like the series lost the charm of 1701 and 1404 with all the research and high level production chains required to keep people happy for more than 10 minutes. I honestly don’t think 2205 will be any different in that regard; I’ll still likely buy the game though when it’s on sale.

I’d just like to add that one of the other reason I felt the game became too complex is because the UI was somewhat inadequate for discerning research module requirements as well as your current inventory of already created modules needed for production of more complex modules.

Research wasn’t really required to keep 20k happy. You were incentivised to use at least the resource refill items since they were much more potent than the ones you could buy but those weren’t all that complicated. Though admittedly the interface was quite a mess.